Why European Startups Should Use Marketing Automation – Starting Now

Published on:January 20, 2017

Chances are you spend a lot of your time trying to get new customers by marketing your product to them. Marketing automation can not only be more effective but also save time to focus on other tasks:

I was listening to my favourites: The Rolling Stones – Beast of Burden and it reminded me about the heavy loads of marketing and repeating tasks we do over and over again every day.

We are sometimes like a beast of burden when running startups.

As the song says:

“I’ll never be your beast of burden My back is broad but it’s a hurting”

We shall never say this in marketing – ever. We have technology with automation as a powerful tool and it should never be seen as a beast of burden to marketing.

Think a bit about the music industry.

The music industry is one of the best examples of an automated revenue stream. Ten years ago, did you think that you would be paying a subscription to listen to music? With the rise of machine learning and big data, we can now do what Spotify does best: create personalised playlists.

A recent study by McKinsey Global Institute shows that 45% of individual paid activities can be automated by current technologies. 45%! And it is just the beginning.

45 percent of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies. In the United States, these activities represent about $2 trillion in annual wages.

Busy Days Are Over!

Imagine, how much more stories we could tell and how many more people we could impact using our added value services if we could have more time and resources.

As soon as you automate your busy work and to-do list, you can go back and spend more time on things you love the most. Creating a meaningful and innovative product and frankly more time with your team and customers, instead of manually sharing social media content, segmenting your customers in excel or importing another CSV.

I’ve worked with businesses in Europe; from startups to large enterprises and everyone has the same challenge:

That’s why we need to work towards automating all our marketing and admin work.

As a startup, we need to grow fast and pivot a lot. To do this, we need a sample of data so we can make our assumption which way can help get to that disruption rate every startup is striving to reach.

What Marketing Automation Experts Think

“Old school technologies for companies are called SoR, which means Systems of Record and examples of such systems were CRM or ERP software, used mainly for data gathering. The new generation of software platforms for companies are called SoE, which means Systems of Engagement, and these are systems that are based on data gathering, but the difference is that they actually DO something for their users.

One example of such SoE platform is a marketing automation system that can automate a lot of manual tasks and increase the number of meaningful interactions with current and potential customers of any startup.

At the end of the day, this approach reduces the costs needed to run operations of the company, and this aspect is crucial for startups.

We once also were a very small startup and used our software to automate almost all marketing and sales processes, and as a bigger company employing nearly 300 people, we still use it almost the same way as we did in the beginning.”

His answer touches all the important aspects a startup should focus on: Cost, speed, relevancy, and DIY.

I’ve also asked Webster Cook, Data Engineer & founder of Iterio Data from San Francisco, now working in Krakow, Poland with a team of developers helping customers in analytics specifically for new user acquisition and retaining the existing user base, for his opinion. Specifically, I’ve asked him why a European startup should make the effort to implement these solutions in their day to day activities:

The second thing is to decrease the response time in your marketing. If somebody signs up for your newsletter saying they are interested in travel deals, you need to reach them in 10-20 minutes, not on Monday morning when your salesperson comes to work, because by that time they probably already purchased their vacation package.

If you can deliver relevant marketing information and do that consistently for an extended period, I think you’re going to make a lot of money. If you’re slow and you’re delivering people irrelevant messages, you’re not going to make any money.”

Online Advertising Is Lacking Quality Content

Online advertising needs to be customized to your audience so you can add valuable content. We are bombarded with non-relevant ads every day, making it obvious, that we need another approach. We need to teach machines to learn more about our audiences and deliver quality content, highly targeted toward our audience.

This is why we at MAN.Digital started a Marketing Automation Network, a place where we gather experts in the field of marketing automation and digital marketing to teach startups and SMEs how to start their marketing automation for free.

To get started we prepared 6 weeks of free video training as well as the possibility to claim digital marketing tools for your startup (also for free). If you’re interested in learning more about marketing automation and digital marketing, we’d like to welcome you to our Marketing Automation Network.

The question now is not why you should use marketing automation, but how and when.

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This blog post is part of a series of blog posts for StartUs Magazine on Marketing Automation for Startups and Small and Medium Enterprises.

Romeo Man is a Business Automation specialist and founder of MAN Digital. If you can get him on your side, you'll start attracting the right people and converting them to customers with a custom-built sales funnel built on data, not hunches. Find out how he does it at MAN.Digital, and follow him @RomeoMan.